Defensible Space in Urban Design

This is a story about how one man’s vision has changed the way the world perceives safety, the dangers of gender-biased data, and the surprising history of car alarms.

Photo by Dominik Martin on Unsplash

In the early 1970s, American architect and city planner Oscar Newman published his book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. A thesis addressing crime in America’s urban centers, it focused specifically on the high rise. Newman…